


Commentary on "Don't Cha"

by yourlibrarian



Series: Reading Fan Vids [3]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Analysis, Commentary, Fanvids, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 05:16:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6739876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giandujakiss's vid had great cuts and contrasts, and it made me rather thinky about Angel's history and relationships, and what different people actually represented to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Commentary on "Don't Cha"

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [[Vid] Don't Cha](https://archiveofourown.org/works/995189) by [giandujakiss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/giandujakiss/pseuds/giandujakiss). 



> Originally posted April 19, 2008

Although the idea behind this vid was rather simple, I really like what giandujakiss did with her cuts and contrasts, and it made me rather thinky in spots. 

I'm sure everyone's going to notice what a great bunch of clip choices she has intercut all through the vid. The first one with "she's all over you" and Dru pouring holy water on Angel made me think about how Dru was always competing for "Daddy"'s attention. I thought back to how she told Darla that Angel's head was always full of her. It seems a bit of an unexplored area to me, and although after saying those lines Dru turns William, it's never clear that she ever gets any more time in Angel's thoughts. As we see in a later set of wonderfully intercut clips, Darla and Spike both loved to provoke him, albeit for different reasons. To the outside view though, the end result might look rather the same. And Dru, who I feel Angel kept around as his living trophy (after setting loose earlier disappointing projects such as Penn), may have found herself even less in Angel's thoughts than before. How much of her madness was her way of trying to please him and hold that attention, I wonder? 

I find it difficult to understand how JM could be surprised by people slashing Spike and Angel. As the vid shows, he flirts with Angel almost as much as he does with Buffy or Dru. 

The fight between Angel and Spike, and Angel and Darla, made me realize that Darla had really succeeded in bringing out Angelus in that episode. Of course, that scene was all about Angel giving up hope and being willing to lose his soul, so it really was about Angelus coming to the fore, even if Angel never lost complete control. How interesting then, to think that it's at that point that Connor is conceived, when Angel is at that liminal state between Angel and Angelus.

This made me wonder if Angel's long period of self-isolation, post-soul, didn't have to do with the fact that his family (whether human or vampiric) has always affected him deeply. I've seen meta postulating that the "family" element was something that Dru brought about, and certainly she was the most open about discussing it. We know what lingering issues Angel had with his father, and that he took his new name from his sister's greeting (though his mother seems to remain a blank). Certainly he remained obsessed with Darla even after he got his soul. It seemed to me that he staked her in S1 as much to protect himself as Buffy, because he was afraid of her influence over him. And I wonder if his lingering wish to have Spike (and Dru) far from him was not simply because, as Spike accused him, of not wanting an undead reminder of his guilt so close at hand, but rather the opposite. A talkative hair shirt might be a good reminder of why he was doing what he was doing. Rather, I think he was afraid that their presence would keep Angelus very near the surface. And perhaps part of his détente with Spike in S5 was because Angel realized that a souled Spike was not the same simmering threat that his unsouled self had been.

The segment with Buffy, particularly the "she ain't a one to share," made me wonder if Angel would have expected Buffy to become involved with Spike. Was it really something that had never occurred to him? Perhaps here again, he was thinking of Darla. Whatever her relationship with Spike (which remains ambiguous), clearly she never looked at him the way she did Angel. 

What I also thought was interesting about the intercuts of Buffy at the prom, and Spike in China, is that these were both a last gasp for Angel and his ties to them. This was his last moment with her as her lover before the final fight and his departure. And it was the last time he was with Spike and the others (so far as we know) for decades –- in each case, a last effort of Angel's to be something he couldn't.

When Spike is juxtaposed with Wes instead of Cordy for the next sequence, it made me realize that Angel's relationship with Cordelia wasn't really like the ones he had with anyone else. To some degree she was like Darla and Spike, in that she had no compunction about telling Angel just what she thought or in trying to get him to do things differently, while at the same time doing just what she herself pleased, regardless of what he thought. But there was never that veneer of violence with her. I think Cordelia, more than anyone, had a relationship with Angel and not Angelus. Although Spike and Buffy have been discussed as a case of Spike's obsession with Slayers (which seems true enough), I don't know if I've ever seen people talk about how Angel was himself highly attracted to Buffy for a similar reason. However, where Spike seemed to see Slayers as the ultimate challenge (something Angelus didn't care for), I think the souled Angel was attracted to Buffy exactly because she represented a purity of purpose that could defeat what he was afraid of -– himself. He wanted to help her, but I think he also wanted her to save him. Yet I think that Buffy tended to bring out the desire to torture that he always had, only since Angel was souled it wasn't expressed in the same way. Cordelia, on the other hand, was not a slayer or a savior, and I think really appealed to the human side of Angel. Little wonder then that she was positioned as "mother" to his child, if not to Angel himself. It seemed to me that the section with Spike/Buffy and Angel/Cordy, played on this a bit. In the end Cordelia brings out Angelus. In the end Buffy brings Spike's soul back to him. 

At the same time I've always seen Wes as similar to William in some ways, although his relationship with his father always seemed much more like Angel. But their earnestness, their tendency to idealize women, their class backgrounds, and their inner ruthlessness, seemed to me to be points of comparison. Angel never actually knew William, but I suspect there was plenty of him left in Spike. And after all, Angel was one of the few fans of his poetry! (What, I wonder, might a young Wes have composed?)

Having the vid close on Angel and Faith gave rather short shrift to that connection, but it always seemed to me that Spike and Faith had a lot in common (even if they were at very different stages in their lives by the time they met). Their attitudes that life was a party, that they loved the crash and bash of it, that they wanted to throw themselves away to escape their inner insecurities, and that they postured indifference but were actually pretty needy, all might have rung a bell back when Angel was watching Faith's descent in S3. Perhaps this was one reason why he felt so committed to making sure she didn't follow that same path?

In a completely non-meta way, the "I understand" at 2:58 with Spike's thumbs up was a hoot but Spike's estimate and Lindsay's sword at 3:19 just made me LOL!


End file.
